A few weeks back I participated in a debate on the subject of reparations. It was sponsored by a civic do-gooder organization called American Public Square and televised, in edited form, by the local PBS station in Kansas City, KCPT.
Knowing that the live audience would be unfriendly and the TV audience less friendly still, I started with a seeming misdirection.
I told of how I found myself repeatedly returning to the ’50s station on my Sirius car radio. The other presets – Elvis, the Beatles, the ’60s, Sinatra, conservative talk – did not lift my spirits the way the ’50s music did.
In the 1950s, there were no songs like the ’60s’ “Eve of Destruction,” “Ball of Confusion,” or “The End.” No, in the ’50s, there was hope in the air.
There was also a certain innocence. A monster 2020 hit like Cardi B’s WAP (look that acronym up on your own) would have been seen as simply monstrous.
I told the audience that of the top 50 hits of the 1950s 24 were by black artists. I then posed the rhetorical question of why – in the years before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action – a black artist had reason to be hopeful.
As a model, I wanted to use the truly gifted Sam Cooke. What intrigued me about Cooke were the lyrics of his 1957 hit, “You Send Me,” specifically the line, “I find myself wanting/ To marry you and take you home.”
In many romantic ballads of the 1950s, by artists black and white, marriage was the end game, the natural culmination of the romance.
That spirit spilled into the early ’60s with explicit lyrics like Paul and Paula’s “Hey, hey, Paula, I want to marry you” from 1961 and “Going to the chapel and we’re going to get married” by the Dixie Cups in 1964.
As much as I liked Cooke, his messy personal life ruled him out as a model. In 1964, months after the Civil Rights Act was passed into law, he was shot and killed in an ugly incident at a Los Angeles motel. Conspiracy theories abound.
I chose Antoine “Fats” Domino instead. What intrigued me about Domino was a comment made by popular 1950s singer (and occasional WND contributor) Pat Boone.
Purists have attacked Boone for covering the songs of black artists, in Domino’s case, his 1955 hit, “Ain’t That a Shame.” Boone’s version sold more than Domino’s – racism, what else?
As Boone noted, however, Domino was thrilled by Boone’s success. Having written the song, Domino got royalties on every record Boone sold.
In 1995, the then 67-year-old Domino was able to retire from touring, return to his home in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward and live comfortably off his royalties.
He and Rosemary, his wife of 61 years, raised eight children together until her death in 2007. Fats died 10 years later but not before receiving the National Medal of Arts among other honors.
For my reparations audience, I imagined Fats Domino on the occasion of his 30th birthday in 1958 and shared with them why he might have been hopeful about the future.
He was not naïve. Growing up in New Orleans and having extensively toured the South, he had experienced Jim Crow firsthand.
Yet by 1958, he had already seen major changes – the integration of the military in 1947 and Major League Baseball that same year, Brown v. The Board of Education in 1954, his own acceptance by white audiences.
By 1958, the entrepreneurial Domino had already made a boatload of money. Looking around his New Orleans community, he saw that jobs were plentiful, families were strong, streets were safe, and the gap between black and white income continued to narrow.
What Domino could not foresee, I told my audience, was that the era of institutional white guilt was about to undo much of that progress, beginning with its seemingly conscious attack on marriage.
Just a dozen or so years later, families were unraveling, the community was crumbling, and crime was spiraling. Worse, almost no one in authority, black or white, dared to saw how liberal largesse had subverted the black family.
I had barely finished speaking when someone in the audience called for a “fact check,” a regular feature of American Public Square programs. But to fact check my comments about Fats Domino suggests just how wary the left is of the truth.
Yes, the fact checker acknowledged, Domino had made more than $750,000 in royalties and had a net worth of $8 million at the time of his death, but, he hastened to add with a Marxist twist, that not all black artists did as well.
My fellow panelists chimed in that white managers routinely ripped off black artists, blah, blah, blah. I would have liked to quote them precisely, but the editors at KCPT deleted my opening comments in their entirety.
In the edited version for TV, of the 40 minutes in which one of the five panelists was speaking, my side of the debate got 11 of those minutes, the “pro” side got 29.
As the editors understood, the truth is the last thing a PBS audience wants to hear.
Note: Jack Cashiil’s latest book,“Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities,” is now available wherever you buy books.
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